Thanks for trying to move the directory in the new patch, but it does not seem to have been picked up by Rietveld. I have only seen patches generated with Mercurial and Git work, but I don’t exactly know _why_ they work :)

Here is a summary of what I would be comfortable adding to Python:

1. Add ctypes.RTLD_MEMBER constant (new API, so 3.6+ only)

2. Basic ctypes.util.find_library("crypto") implementation for AIX. But cases like find_library("libintl.so") should fail. I think your earlier patches were closer to this implementation than the later ones.

I am a bit hesitant about the automatic behaviour of CDLL("libcrypto.a(libcrypto.so.1.0.0)") using RTLD_MEMBER. IMO it may be better to let the caller specify RTLD_MEMBER explicitly. If a shared library file literally called “/usr/lib/libcrypto.a(libcrypto.so.1.0.0)” existed, i.e. not inside an archive, would dlopen("libcrypto.a(libcrypto.so.1.0.0)", RTLD_NOW) succeed? I admit this is an unlikely scenario, but it seems bad to reduce the domain of a low-level API.

I understand it would be good to have the return value of find_library() consistent with the name accepted by CDLL(). Perhaps a new parameter format would help, such as a tuple (archive, member).

I am not comfortable with other aspects. I think I would have to see more discussion with other people to change my opinion:

1. CDLL("libintl.so") should not load “libintl.a(libintl.so.1)”. I understand you want this to help code written for Gnu or Linux automatically work on AIX, but it doesn’t feel correct and robust to me. Perhaps moving this sort of thing to a separate function or package would be better.

2. find_library("libintl.so") -> "libintl.a(libintl.so.1)". I would expect it to look for a shared library installed in something like "/usr/lib/liblibintl.so.a", unless I have misunderstood how compile-time linking (cc -llibintl.so) works.

3. find_library() should not set the LIBPATH environment variable.